Give It Your Best

Give it your best and give time to the rest.

The rest will work itself out, while you get better.

-- doug smith

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Perfect Relationships

Is your partner perfect? Are you? I've made enough mistakes in my life and in my relationships to know that the search for perfection is illusive at best and at worst, frustrating. There are no perfect people out there waiting for us, to fall in love with us, to fix us, to bring us what we need, to fulfill our dreams. But that's OK. In fact, that's wonderful. We don't need a perfect person in order to create love. Love creates the perfect person. -- Douglas Brent Smith

Strategic and Communication Skills

Supervisors often bring strong technical skills to the job. When they have worked in technical jobs prior to becoming a supervisor, they were often the best at what they do. They know the ground level part of their business well enough to solve problems and deal with day to day issues. Leading is all that and more. High performance leadership requires attention to detail AND a constant view of the big picture: where is your team, your market, and your customer base headed? What does the future hold? Strong supervisors learn to add strategic and communication skills to their technical ability. What are you doing today to develop your sense of the big picture? -- Douglas Brent Smith

Brace Yourself On The Edge

Do you pride yourself in being cutting edge? Do you try new techniques, stay creative, build innovation instead of comfort? Good for you. And if you said no, allow me to encourage you to push the edge a bit more. Get out of your comfort zone. The really big goals makes us just bit uncomfortable. We might even sweat. Push the edge, even knowing that sometimes when you push the edge you get pushed back. People might object to the radical new approach. They might take exception to your changes. Push the edge anyway. Leading often means going where no one else has gone. All the way to the edge. Pack a lunch, it could take a while, but do stay with it. -- Doug Smith

Win The Game

It would be nice to win the game. But, do you ever feel like you're in a game that keeps shifting the rules and making it easy to make progress but impossible to win? You've probably noticed lots of game elements creeping into service. Points, incentives, expiring coupons followed by new expiring coupons, leader-boards...on an on a relentless attack on service comes from playing a game designed -- you guessed it -- to maximize profit. If the customer is happy, fine, but the point is to make money. Not to put too fine a point on it but that's a lousy point. What if there could be something better? What if customer service excellence became playing a game where the customer always wins and that makes you happy? You don't have to. "give away the store" to achieve a winning game for all of the players. Just stop stacking the rules against customers and watch how much more they will want to do business with you. -- doug smith

Call Fewer Meetings

Do you have too many meetings? Many leaders do. Staff meetings, committee meetings, team meetings, project meetings, all-company meetings...the list goes on. Most of us can think of many meetings that were simply wastes of our time. Time is too important to waste is bad meetings. Do the people in your meeting want to be there? If not, maybe it's not a meeting that you need. Maybe there's another way to communicate your message. Maybe the work that is waiting is too important to wait. We can like the feeling of having a meeting. It feels like we're doing something. But if we're not -- if we are delaying real work, maybe we don't need that meeting after all. What scheduled meeting could you eliminate this week? Wouldn't it be nice to have that time to be...well, happy and more productive? -- Doug Smithy

A Supervisory Benefit

Did you ever notice that companies often cut managers but seldom cut supervisors? Makes you wonder just how important that supervisory job is, doesn't it? As often as it can feel challenging, there is much to be thankful for about being a supervisor. Everyday is a new opportunity. Every team member is a new sign of unlimited potential. Every customer is a chance to make a difference in the world. Take pride in being a supervisor. Your organization, your customers, and your people need you. -- Douglas Brent Smith

Stay With It Until It IS Easy

Have you ever noticed that some of the things we want to achieve the most are the hardest? It's natural to get stuck. The goal seems too big, too tough, too much beyond our capacity. For many, that's the excuse to give up. High performance leaders don't give up on their important goals. Even when it's hard. And (even more importantly) they don't allow their team members to give up too easily, either. The job of the leader includes challenging AND supporting team members. Give up one, and the other becomes meaningless. Stay with the tough tasks needed to achieve your goals. Practice. Build. Grow. What once seems hard is meant to become easy. Stay with it. -- Doug Smith

Creating Alignment

What is the connection between your actions and goals? How do your goals connect to your overall mission and purpose? Do you have a sense that what you do matters and gets you closer to accomplishing what is most important to you? High performance leaders align their actions to their goals and their goals to their mission. It's how they get things done that matter. It's the filter of success. Does that task that someone is asking you to do contribute to your purpose? Then do it. If it doesn't, negotiate another path, another step, perhaps another set of hands to get it done. Our time is too valuable to spend it on anything that does not contribute to our happiness, and our happiness is largely dependent on doing what matters most to us and that contributes to the well-being of others. We can run, we can hide, but without that alignment of action, goals, and mission how will we ever reach our potential? Alignment creates that guidance that w...

Can You Make It Seem Inevitable?

I can remember certain times when leaders that I worked for were so influential and so convincing tht what they were promoting seemed inevitable. People realized, as in the Star Trek Next Generation shows, that "resistance is futile." Not because the leaders were ruthless. Not because the change was imposed (the way the Borg would impose it!) but because there was no stopping the change. When GE made a major move to go paperless, things happened that make resistance futile. Documents became easier to find online. Approvals for information took online shortcuts. Copy machines and printers disappeared. We didn't completely eliminate paper, but we saved enough to fill many forests. When Whole Foods does Good Organics training, there's no ducking it. You don't get to choose. Leaders project the confidence, urgency, and insistence to make your change in knowledge deeper and inevitable. One of my favorite leaders of all time, Jim Hursey my high school track c...

Letting Go

Are you working hard on any goals that you shouldn't be? Are some things getting in the way of your success? It's easy to accumulate a full schedule of meetings and tasks surrounding goals that were not ours to begin with but now consume all of our time. Bold leaders weed out those types of goals. Strong leaders focus on the goals that they align with their mission. High performance leaders let go of goals that don't belong. When we let go of the wrong goals it makes room for the right ones. Maybe that goal made sense at one time. Maybe it was thrust to you from someone else who meant well but who was not fully away of your mission or the list of goals you were already working on. Maybe the goal just doesn't belong to you. What goal should you let go of today? -- Douglas Brent Smith http://frontrangeleadership.com

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